Williams Carlos Williams Quotes & Sayings

Marriage
So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field. — William Carlos Williams

When I am alone I am happy. — William Carlos Williams

I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry. — William Carlos Williams

It's a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part! — William Carlos Williams

The only realism in art is of the imagination. — William Carlos Williams

Sunshine of late afternoon
On the glass tray
a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which
a key is lying
And the
immaculate white bed — William Carlos Williams

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses. — William Carlos Williams

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic. — William Carlos Williams

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it. — William Carlos Williams

Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable. — William Carlos Williams

THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night. — William Carlos Williams

Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell. — William Carlos Williams

The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts. — William Carlos Williams

Through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. — William Carlos Williams

The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades - Seven feet tall the dark, dried weed stalks make a part of the night a red lace on the milky blue sky — William Carlos Williams

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.
Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR — Philip Levine

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care. — William Carlos Williams

Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever. — William Carlos Williams

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions. — William Carlos Williams

There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. — William Carlos Williams

To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do? — William Carlos Williams

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. — Frank O'Hara

Exhausted after a full day of treating patients, William Carlos Williams angrily answered the phone. "Doctor," said a woman's voice, "my child has swallowed a mouse." "Then get him to swallow a cat," he replied, and slammed down the receiver. — Ross Wetzsteon

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge — William Carlos Williams

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. — Donald Hall

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized ... A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is. — William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small machine made of words ... Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. — William Carlos Williams

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery. — William Carlos Williams

The poet thinks with his poem... — William Carlos Williams

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze. — William Carlos Williams

When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact. — Wendell Berry

A poem is a small machine made out of words. — William Carlos Williams

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission. — William Carlos Williams

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? - William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower — Jodi Picoult

He was always on the point of 'going away', where it didn't seem to matter ... — William Carlos Williams

Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them — William Carlos Williams

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi. — William Carlos Williams

I have had my dream - like others
And it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
With feet planted on the ground,
And look up at the sky
Feeling my clothes about me,
The weight of my body in my shoes,
The rim of my hat, air passing in and out
At my nose - and decide to dream no more. — William Carlos Williams

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination. — William Carlos Williams

THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep - or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish - However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it - tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention. — William Carlos Williams

There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will. — William Carlos Williams

A new music is a new mind. — William Carlos Williams

When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity. — William Carlos Williams

It was too strong in the air.
I had no rest against that
springtime!
The pounding of the hoofs on the
raw sods
stayed with me half through the night.
I awoke smiling but tired. — William Carlos Williams

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact ... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard. — William Carlos Williams

Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness. — William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks. — William Carlos Williams

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets. — William Carlos Williams

In summer, the song sings itself. — William Carlos Williams

That which is possible is inevitable. — William Carlos Williams

Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. — William Carlos Williams

After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters. — William Carlos Williams

A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin. — William Carlos Williams

Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze. — William Carlos Williams

The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky. — William Carlos Williams

If they give you lined paper, write the other way. — William Carlos Williams

To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part. — William Carlos Williams

The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes. — William Carlos Williams

Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months' wonder, the city
the man, an identity - it can't be
otherwise - an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! Obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing. — William Carlos Williams

All to no end save beauty
the eternal
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful — William Carlos Williams

I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary. — William Carlos Williams

My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots. — William Carlos Williams

Nothing whips my blood like verse. — William Carlos Williams

We, in
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire. — William Carlos Williams

Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind. — Edward Dahlberg

The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together. — William Carlos Williams

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak. — William Carlos Williams

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written.
A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence.
Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive. — William Carlos Williams

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time. — William Carlos Williams

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/ ... the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound. — William Carlos Williams

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of — William Carlos Williams

The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car — William Carlos Williams

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned — William Carlos Williams

At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse -
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident. — William Carlos Williams

Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety. — William Carlos Williams

Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance. — William Carlos Williams

I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*. — William Carlos Williams

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits. — William Carlos Williams

Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight! — William Carlos Williams

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem. — William Carlos Williams

The set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way. — William Carlos Williams

Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note. — William Carlos Williams

Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct. — William Carlos Williams

III THE DESCENT BECKONS The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned. - William Carlos Williams, The Descent — Cassandra Clare

Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect? — William Carlos Williams

History must stay open, it is all humanity. — William Carlos Williams

Say it! No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams

A new world is only a new mind. — William Carlos Williams

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels. — William Carlos Williams

Their story, yours, mine - it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them. — William Carlos Williams

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency. — William Carlos Williams

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there. — William Carlos Williams

First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere. — William Carlos Williams

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle. — William Carlos Williams

As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world — William Carlos Williams

So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens. — William Carlos Williams

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile. — William Carlos Williams

they are mystified by certain instances. — William Carlos Williams

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies. — William Carlos Williams

Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness — William Carlos Williams